In the process of moving all of my notes from one app to another, a blog post for another day, and the biggest pain point so far has been editing Markdown tables.

The app I am going from has a lot of tables, and the app I am going to does everything in Markdown (light weight formatting for plain text files but gives p enough bells and whistles for things like notes and scraping webpages). The problem is the old app includes a bunch of things in the tables like:

• Created date
• Updated data

Which I really don’t need in the new app, or at least don’t need in the table.

Tables in Markdown are formatted like this:

|Name|Tags|URL|Created Date|
|---|---|---|---|
|some name|some tag|some url|some date|

Which is pretty cool. Tables that are mostly readable in text or rendered as Markdown.

Problem is when you want to remove a column. I cannot find an editor or plugin that allows for manipulation of the table like that. Which means to remove a column, especially more than one column or a column in the middle, you have to get creative or do it all by hand (ugh).

I ended up trying to get creative and went down the regular expressions route. Though I have to eventually end up in Visual Studio, since VS.code doesn’t support replacing named capture groups (why have capture groups if you cannot use them for replace?)

Only other thing I thought of was to open Sheets/Excel and import the table, edit it, and then re-export it. No idea if either do that.

The lack of ability to edit tables is a pretty bad experience. Little surprised, given how ubiquitous Markdown has become that there is not another solution for this.

So, I guess it is not really Markdown tables that suck. They do their job pretty well. Updating them is a pain.

-luke
Boston, MA
2023.08.21